SEO Expert Insights: May 2023 News Round-up

In this month’s instalment of our SEO Expert Insights series, our co-founder James Owen will be looking at the following:

• 10 Things We Are Celebrating As We Turn 10
• May Google Updates
• Google Search Generative Experience
• Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Deadline
• Google’s Updates To Country Code At Top-Level AI Domain
• E-E-A-T & Google Helpful Content Update

Video Transcription

10 Things We’re Celebrating As We Turn 10

The first story is all about Click Intelligence itself, as we have now been in business for 10 years after James co-founded the company with Simon Brisk.

So how did we mark this milestone? Well, there are 10 things that we are particularly proud of:

• Company culture
• Team growth
• Our clients
• Our charitable efforts
• Looking after the environment
• Awards and recognition
• Employee ownership trust
• Service delivery
• Our expertise
• Helping other businesses grow

May Google Updates

In the month of May 2023, there were 4 unconfirmed Google Updates, so the month was pretty busy!

We had the following unconfirmed updates:

• 1^st & 2^nd May 2023: Early May Search Algorithm Update – Tools that we use to monitor rankings, such as RankRanger, Semrush, and Moz, were showing huge fluctuations at the start of the month, which suggests there was an unconfirmed update around this time.
• 10^th & 11^th May 2023: Google I/O Search Algorithm Update – Using Mozcast, we could see spikes on the 10^th and 11^th of May to suggest a change has taken place.
• 16^th & 17^th May 2023: Google Search Algorithm Ranking Volatility – Mozcast showed us a lot of fluctuation on these dates.
• 22^nd & 23^rd May 2023: Google Search Algorithm Ranking Volatility ­– A lot of fluctuation in the SERPs (search engine results pages) around these dates on Mozcast and other tracking tools have shown us similar.

The last official update was at the end of April with its Reviews Update. We know that Google is currently doing a lot of testing based on these fluctuations.

You might be wondering what you can do about this. The best place to look is at our Drop In Keyword Rankings And How To Fix It Guide on our Knowledge Hub for all the answers and best practices to follow when dealing with confirmed or unconfirmed Google Updates. Remember not to panic if you are experiencing a change in rankings.

Google Search Generative Experience: All New AI Google Search Engine

Google released a preview of its latest experiment with AI: its all-new search engine called Google Search Generative Experience. It has brought generative AI into its search interface, so it is designed for a more youthful audience. The generative experience allows you to follow up your initial search query with more questions, and Google AI will generate an answer for you.

The preview also gave us a sneak peek into how the search engine will look. As well as all the usual features you would expect to see in Google Search, such as the search bar and your icons, the Google Search Generative Experience provides a Generative Answer to your query alongside linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. to high-quality and trusted sites that support the answer as well as a Follow-up button. You can sign up to test it yourself in Google Search Labs.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Deadline

In May, Google confirmed that the deadline for GA4 happening was not changing. It’s something that Google has been talking about a lot, and they will move over to the GA4. At Click Intelligence, we’ve been working with clients over the last 6 months, helping them to identify the reports they need to have uploaded so they are ready to rock and roll on GA4.

Read our blog post titled What Is Google Analytics 4 (GA4) & Everything You Need To Know for more information on this.

Google Search Treats .AI ccTLD As gTLD At Domain Level

Thanks to the rise in artificial intelligence (AI), Google has now listed .ai as a generic country code. It’s not associated with a country, but it can now be used as a generic top-level domain (gTLD) code.

E-E-A-T & Google Helpful Content Update

To finish off this month’s episode, we wanted to point you in the direction of some quick-fire articles on the subject of Google E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) and the Helpful Content Update.

These are topics that we have been discussing at length at Click Intelligence, and these are the hottest articles on the subject that caught our co-founder’s SEO eye this month:

• Google announced that it uses a mixture of factors to determine how content demonstrates E-E-A-T in a Twitter update. It reaffirms how important it is to get E-A-T-T into your content. When writing content, you need to be mindful of what Google is looking for in terms of quality content.
• To throw a spanner in the works for content creators everywhere, Google also made a statement saying that high-quality content might still be of low value to the web. When producing content, you need to make sure it answers the question that users are searching for, that it is optimised for both the user and GooglebotGooglebot is a web crawler. It follows links and indexes pages for search engines to make it easier for users to find what they're looking for., and technical elements like page load speeds, and that you are building quality backlinks to it.
• Google also hinted that its Helpful Content system will be able to find hidden gems in blog posts and forums in a future update. This will see an improvement in how it ranks results, detailing that helpful information can sometimes be located where you wouldn’t expect it, for example, a comment on a forum, a post on an obscure blog, or a very specialist article. The future update will take this into account to ensure users receive the most helpful and relevant information.

For more information on all things search engine related, please subscribe to the Click Intelligence YouTube channel or check out our Knowledge Hub, where you can read about all the latest SEO updates and what they mean for your business.